The essential functionality of Limitation Philosophy is seen in the principle of the Limitation Paradigm.
The Limitation Paradigm
The Personality and Being of God is Limitless.
The personality and being of human beings is not limitless.
All of our existence as bounded beings plays out in a boundless universe. When I show the limitation of language it refers back to the essence of our bounded being, and when I explain operational omniscience it refers back to God’s boundless being. All physical and non-physical reality expressed in language (concrete and abstract) refers back to bounded temporal/local existences playing out in a boundless (eternal/infinite) universe.
There is a very powerful advantage to having this foundational principle onto which all the further understanding of one’s beliefs are constructed. When things become complicated, which is natural to the infinite minutia of reality, I can refer back to this clear essential principle and sort out my thoughts in reference to the basic foundational principle. This often enlightens me with straightforward insights into the matter, and when it doesn’t, I can humbly admit to being stumped. A thing which can and does happen to limited minds.
On Foundational Reasoning
An Observation: Reasonings, that is thinking about particular things often rest on some type of foundational idea, a single arch conception or some systematic conception of ideas. In the following treatise, each of these will be discussed using examples. The idea of reliance on the opinion of a medical doctor is an example of a single simple foundational concept. After that I tackle the more complex reasonings founded on theism as it is traditionally conceived.
The Fundamental Note and Its Harmonics
The musical sounds of an instrument are rich and vibrant. The main sound of the note of a plucked string which is recorded as its musical notation is called the fundamental but sounding alongside the fundamental note are numerous harmonics which enrich the character of the fundamental. Human thought is like this in the sense that our thoughts on small specific matters are related back to more fundamental concepts. Our rationale in a small matter is often related back to and relies on some logical aspect of a foundational concept. The fundamental idea is a far more general idea whose logic justifies the rationalization of smaller matters in accord with its meaning.
So, the rationale of a specific reasoning is seen as a product of the foundational idea, the logical soundness of the fundamental concept is assumed to be solid, else why rely on it.
Because there is a cognitive bias for founded ideas, many errors in thinking result from relying on the mere presence of a foundational idea. Without questioning the foundation a faulty rationale for a particular idea is formed in the assumption that any idea founded on a larger conception that has some currency must be correct. This cognitive bias is at the root of widespread error.
Having recognized the importance of foundational ideas we should now examine these fundamental conceptions and how the operate in our minds.
A foundational idea can be as simple as the following example of a rationale.
“Because a medical doctor told me to do this.”
As a basis for reasoning this is not certain to be bad. Doctors often give good advice that it’s beneficial to follow. However, given the history of medical practice many times the doctors have been wrong about matters of great consequence, and the doctors of our present era are not immune from error either. So, while it’s wise to listen, one ought not surrender all right to independent decision to the foundational rationale of following a medical doctors advice.
This example demonstrates the essential dynamics of founded reasoning and shows that even good foundations are not worthy of blind reliance. In this example, the particular instance should not be generalized. Rather than relying on some foundational idea’s logic the individual merits of the specific case ought to decide the matter.
The Foundations of Religious Belief
For limited beings cognitive heuristics are not optional. We must rely on rules of thumb and other similar things because we are not omniscient.
Ordinary Theism as a Systematic Foundation for Specific Rationales
The systematic idea of Theism is based in three primary ideas that form the theistic worldview. This broad ‘way of seeing things (worldview)’ is the basis for much of the rationale in societies with a history of monotheistic religions as their primary cultural form of faith. Europe and the Americas are societies of this type.
The three pillars of ordinary theism are the anthropomorphism of deity, an authoritative framework for belief and transactional certainty.
Theists believe that God thinks, feels and intends much as they themselves do. The God of Scripture plays a functional role in temporal human dramas by acting as a character in numerous stories. Human conceptions of things like paternalism, loyalty, and stealing are shared by the mind of God (The idea is that God shares our conceptions everything in the the world of things, and God’s mind, like ours, uses that conception as a cognitive framework). Anger, subjective affection and sadness are part of God’s emotional being and the will of God is something that can be thwarted by human disobedience.
In name, but not in practice, God’s human-likeness is denied. God like us, and God not like us, both rely on self-reference revealing the essential subjectivity of theistic faith and its anthropomorphic character.
God’s authoritative character is the second pillar. This aspect of theism makes for the foundation of many rationales. There is nothing more conducive to relying upon than rules made by God.
Finally, there is the concept of transactional certainty. In essence, the terms of one’s relationship to the monotheistic deity are the basis for certainty. One could argue that all ordinary theistic belief begins with the assumption that we are related in some way to God, and then beliefs are built out from there. Even deism, where God creates the world and then chooses to not intervene in earthly human affairs is an explicit relationship that depends on the anthropomorphic character of God to reason in this very humanlike way. That this distant relationship is the paramount aspect of deistic belief illustrates the highly subjective character of ordinary theism.
Because God thinks, feels, and intends in the same way we do some form of transactional relationship is assumed, this assumption is based in laws handed down alongside the assumption of a highly subjective interest by God in us.
Ordinary Theism and Specific Rationales
The legal character of theism turns every human action into something of potential legal consequence. Our every action is subject to judgement in the cognitive system of ordinary theism. The concepts of sin, obedience, and justice are rooted in theistic belief structures. Secularized justice maintains the language often deifying the abstract concept Justice to take the place of God in the phrasing of its official pronouncements.
Of course, in secular societies one often excuses one’s self as just mistaken, so there is some mitigation of this tendency. However, when one chooses to look for it we are, as a society, a very self-righteous lot. We tend to see others who make mistakes as wrong and are quick to see bad intention where something was done without any forethought at all. Mistaken tends to be a characterization we apply more to ourselves and those we prefer than to anyone we feel apart from.
This legalistic worldview has many behavioral consequences. For example, the belief that if we are very hard on ourselves we will do better next time. Perhaps we will improve, but at what cost? Is the endless running down of our own selves as sinful worth a bit of increased productivity? Wouldn’t our lives be happier if we stopped reflexively seeing ourselves and others as wrong and sinful?
There are many other specific beliefs arising from theism’s legalistic mindset which affect our rationale for doing the things based on beliefs founded on the theistic worldview we inherit from our society of origin.
It has been pointed out that fish do not see themselves as wet because they live in water. Perhaps the pervasive hierarchies in Western societies are like that. Immersed in them throughout all of our lives we cannot envision any other way to be. There may be a lot of other immersions we are unaware of besides hierarchies.
An Alternative to Ordinary Theism
“There is no original sin, only limitation.”
Having observed that sentence being written
down, William says, “What we call sin, our
inability to be perfect human beings, is simply
us living in the world of things as limited
human beings with limited personalities. Like
the Apostle Paul we do not understand
ourselves and others in the complete way God
does. We are incomplete. We are limited. We
are bounded beings existing for a short time, in
a small space, and we pass away. We err, not
because of our first ancestor’s transgression, but
because of the nature of our being.
From Ockham’s Epiphany by Thomas Laperriere
Limitation Philosophy serves as an alternative to ordinary theism. Deity in Limitation Philosophy is not obsessed with hierarchy, and the concepts of sin and guilt. As limited being mistakes don’t make us imperfect. The concept of perfection is a troublesome creation of the theistic mindset. There is no making perfect of a limited personality. Mistakes are expected and the self-righteousness we inherit from our society of origin is a thing to be unlearned. Seeing ourselves and others as limited rather than sinful is a virtue we work to acquire in spite of our acculturation.
As a system of foundational concepts Limitation Philosophy provides a worldview in which God is an objective reality, not a person like is in thought and feeling whom we try and fail to understand the way we know other people in the world. Unlike deism our relationship to Deity is not something that can be characterized by terminology of human relationships.
Much of Limitation Philosophy’s theology is counterintuitive and not just because of acculturation. Anthropomorphism comes natural to us and is widely employed in all human languages and cultures. The idea of God being even more law obsessed as we are seems obvious until we realize that an operationally omniscient deity, being capable of infinite variety, has no need of patterns, regularity or laws.
This concept of the Deity being capable of infinite variety is a foundation concept in the refutation of the anthropomorphic conception of deity.
As a fundamental the Limitation Paradigm sounds a very clear note. Because it is uncomplicated there is no dissonance. God is limitless, we are limited. This describes the entire universe of our existence in the most basic of terms.
However, life is complicated. For the big complicated things like an accurate theology expressed in language there are no easy answers. Limitation Philosophy as a field of study is not easy, in part because it is so very counterintuitive, but every potential answer it provides can be tested against the general principles of the Limitation Paradigm.
The Problem of Evil
For example, there is a philosophical dilemma in ordinary theism called, The Problem of Evil, it’s irreconcilable to any honest philosopher espousing ordinary theism. Because it cannot be reconciled with the foundational concepts of ordinary theism facing the Problem of Evil often turns the honest inquirer into an atheist.
The problem itself is very basic. Ordinary theism attributes infinite goodness to God. Like all of the divine attributes this quality of God’s natural essence has no operational basis and many things impossible to deny contradict it. Honest inquiry cannot find evidence of infinite goodness in the Holocaust of World War 2 and numerous other things like it. So the God of the Scriptures, whose being is of infinite goodness cannot exist. At least not to anyone being truly honest with themselves.
Ordinary theism may come natural the human personality but it cannot answer this problem. For some very sincere people following a long road of diligent inquiry, this becomes practically the only question that matters.
So how does Limitation Philosophy answer this dilemma?
First of all, in the theology of Limitation Philosophy all divine attributes are operational. Omniscience, the arch attribute in Limitation Philosophy, is operated by a process of divine proprioception.
( Proprioception is perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body. In Limitation Philosophy’s doctrine of being physical self-awareness is an important sub-process within the context of embodiment and it has a crucial role in the emergent nature of personality.)
Limitation Philosophy is objective in character. It sees no evidence of infinite goodness in God or anywhere else, so it make no claim regarding its existence. As the originator of Limitation Philosophy I can speak for the school and say that ‘goodness’ infinite or otherwise is a highly subjective human concept (and a high level language abstraction having no concrete reality). Like the ability to walk through walls while standing on floors its something writers dole out to fictional superheroes, not something that can or would exist in any functional reality.
Link a downloadable PDF including Ockham’s Epiphany
Audio of God not a character in story part of Ockham’s Epiphany
In Ockham’s Epiphany the logic of a truly limitless deity not being a functional character in human dramas is set out with adequate detail. God, in Limitation Philosophy, is an objective reality having a physical aspect of being, not the character in the mythic stories of scripture. Omnipotence is not ‘whatever your imagination can conjure up.’ Omnipotence is the operational result of all things having their limited being within the limitless being of God.
The inspiration for this post was a bit indirect. I was reading an interpretation of John Locke the Conduct of Understanding by Stephen Bennett. Link to that PDF
Link to Open Source Text of The Conduct of Understanding, Locke
The inspiration for this post came mostly from section 6 Principles. In that section Locke discusses Foundational Ideas and the problems associated with them.
Section 6 Principles (Click triangle to reveal text.)
Principles
I have also written about another fault that blocks or misleads
men in their knowledge, but I need to take it up again
here so as to examine it to the bottom and see the root
it springs from. It is the custom of allying oneself with
principles that are not self-evident and often not even true. It
is not unusual to see men base their opinions on foundations
that are no more certain and solid than the propositions built
on them and accepted because of them. I mean foundations
like these:
•The founders (or leaders) of my party are good men,
so their tenets are true;
•Proposition P is the opinion of a sect that is erroneous,
so P is false;
•P has long been accepted in the world, so it is true; or
P is new, and therefore false.
These and many like them, which are by no means the
measures of truth and falsehood, are taken by the general
run of men as standards by which they accustom their understanding
to judge. Falling thus into a habit of determining
truth and falsehood by such wrong measures, it’s no wonder
that they embrace error for certainty and are very positive in
opinions they have no ground for.
If someone accepts any of these false maxims and is
confronted with an open challenge to them, then he must
admit that they are fallible and not something he would allow
an opponent to use in argument; but after he is convinced of
this you’ll see him go on using them as bases for argument
on the very next occasion that presents itself. If someone
uses such wrong measures even after he sees that they
can’t be relied on, wouldn’t you be inclined to see him as
willing to deceive [see Glossary] himself and mislead his own
understanding? But perhaps he is not as blameworthy as comparing many different and opposing deductions. What,
then, can be expected from men who don’t see the need for
any such reasoning as this, and wouldn’t be able to do it if
they did see the need?. . . .
What should be done in such a case? I answer: we should
always remember what I said earlier, that the faculties of
our minds are improved and made useful to us in the same
way that our bodies are. If you want a man to write, paint,
dance or fence well, or perform any other manual operation
nimbly and easily, no-one expects him to be able to do
this—however much vigour, activeness, suppleness and skill
he has naturally—unless he has been used to it, and has
employed time and trouble in adapting the relevant parts of
his body to these motions. So it is with the mind. If you want
a man to reason well, you must •get him used to reasoning
early, •exercise his mind in observing the connection of ideas
and following them in sequence. Nothing does this better
than mathematics, which I think should be taught to all
who have the time and opportunity, not so much to make
them mathematicians as to make them reasonable creatures;
for though we all call ourselves reasonable, the fact is that
nature gives us only the seeds of rationality; we are born to
be rational creatures if we choose to be, but what makes us
so is use and exercise—we’re only as rational as far as hard
work and application [see Glossary] has taken us. . . .
This hasn’t been widely recognised because everyone
in his private affairs uses some sort of reasoning or other,
enough to call him ‘reasonable’. The mistake is that anyone
who is found to be reasonable in one thing is concluded to be
reasonable in everything, and to think or say that he isn’t is
thought to be such a mean insult, such a senseless criticism,
that nobody ventures to do it. . . . Well, it’s true that someone
who reasons well on one topic has a mind naturally capable
of reasoning well on others—just as strongly and clearly, and perhaps more so—if his understanding were so employed.
But it’s equally true that someone who can reason well today
on one topic can’t reason at all today on others, though he
may be able to in a year’s time. . . .
Try in men of low and poor education who have never
raised their thoughts above the spade and the plough, or
looked beyond the ordinary drudgery of a day-labourer. Take
the thoughts of such man out of the narrow range he has
been confined to all his life and you’ll find him no more
capable of reasoning, almost, than a perfect natural [= ‘a
severely mentally defective person’]. You will find that most men
have governed all their thoughts by just one or two rules
on which their conclusions immediately depend; these rules,
true or false, have been the maxims they’ve been guided
by; take them away and these men are totally at a loss,
their compass and pole-star gone, their understanding not
knowing which way to turn; so they either •go straight back
to their old maxims as their bases for all truth, despite
what can be said to show their weakness, or •abandon them
and abandon all truth and further enquiry, thinking that
there’s no such thing as certainty. If you try to broaden their
thoughts and settle them on principles that are more remote
and more sure, they either can’t easily grasp them or, if they
can, they don’t know what use to make of them; for long
deductions from remote principles is what they haven’t been
used to and can’t manage.
I don’t say that grown men can never be improved or
broadened in their understandings; but I think I may say that
this won’t be done without hard work and application, which
will require more time and trouble than adult men—settled
in their course of life—will allow to it; which is why it seldom
is done. . . .
Anyone engaged in teaching the young, especially in
teaching mathematics, can see how their minds open gradually, and how it is exercise alone that opens them.
Sometimes they will be stuck for a long time at one part
of a demonstration, not from lack of will and application,
but from their failure to see the connection between two
ideas—a connection that is, to one whose understanding is
more exercised, as visible as anything can be. It would be the
same with a grown man beginning to study mathematics. . . .